Ancient Meteor Blast Peppered Mammoths With "Shrapnel"

An ancient meteor impact in North America sent up waves of rock fragments that peppered prehistoric mammals with "space shrapnel" about 34,000 years ago, scientists say.
Many of the animals, particularly in the region near present-day Alaska , didn't survive. That's the story being pieced together by a research team led by Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
The team had done previous work on a suspected impact that occurred 13,000 years ago. But while looking for evidence of that more recent blast in mammoth tusks, the scientists found traces of the much older event.
"The surprise was the tusks were dating back to 30,000 to 34,000 years ago," Firestone said.
"Nobody had thought of it before. It was serendipitous."
The work was presented this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California.
Tiny "Bullet Holes," Micrometeorites Found
While searching for evidence of the more recent cosmic impact, team member Allen West, an Arizona geophysicist, noticed an odd pattern as he was combing through thousands of ancient tusks.
He found that the top-facing sides of a few tusks were pockmarked by holes 0.08 to 0.11 inch (2 to 3 millimeters) across.
The pockmarks were found on seven mammoth tusks—most likely from near Alaska's Yukon River—and the skull and horns of a Siberian bison. (That the holes were found on only one side of the bones indicated that the impacts came from a single direction, Firestone said.

Largest Spitting Cobra Found -- New Species

The newly anointed Ashe's spitting cobra, or large brown spitting cobra (Naja ashei), can reach lengths of more than 9 feet (274 centimeters) and is believed to deliver more venom with a single bite than any other cobra on the planet.

The aggressive reptile was previously identified as a brown-colored variant of the black-necked spitting cobra, though researchers had long suspected that it merited its own species. Now blood and tissue analysis have confirmed this theory to be true.
The snake dwells in the dry lowlands of north and east Kenya, as well as in Uganda and Ethiopia.
It is named after James "Jimmy" Ashe, a prominent herpetologist who founded the Bio-Ken snake farm and research center in Watamu, Kenya, where the snake is commonly found. Bio-Ken milks snakes for their venom and sends it to labs to develop antivenin.
The findings were first published earlier this year in the animal taxonomy magazine Zootaxa by researchers at the University of Wales and the Biodiversity Foundation for Africa in Buluwayo, Zimbabwe.
But they gained wider notice on Friday when the researchers announced the new species through the nonprofit conservation group Wildlife Direct.
Royjan Taylor, the director of Bio-Ken, said the paper's authors had asked him to wait several months to give time for other herpetologists to challenge their findings. None did.
Spitting cobras eat eggs, carrion, snakes, lizards, and birds. Their venom has two uses: to kill prey and for defense. The reptiles can spray venom several yards and usually aim for the attackers eyes, giving the snake the best chance for escape.